Off My Trolley

WOW, we've been really crap at updating this!

What can I say - Pat got promoted, Nat came off his meds, and I was as flaky as I ever am.

So today: Good Deed For The Day

I have just done, my good deed for the day.

Locally there is a B&Q warehouse, which has shopping trolleys of hitherto unknown depravity, outlawlessness, and viciousness.

This scarred and ruthless bunch of wire-frame desperadoes make Clint Eatwood's "man with no name" and Sid Vicious look like dapper gentlemen, and the stars of WWF look like a bunch of beansprout-eating nuns.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, the trolleys working their sentences out at my local B&Q - or perhaps, being harboured, I know little of trolley culture - are among the most savage and contrary metal steeds known to humanity: they are taking their revenge for every last canal-drowned member of their kind, while glugging down white spirit and snorting glue until their chrome coating peels off in despair - I have lost whole inches of shin flesh already to their incorrigible rage.

They have no tyres, they have fractured plastic on the handbar thingiebob, they have - absolutely no mercy. Mess with them, indeeed pull them out to carry your DIY supplies, purely at your own risk.

So, tonight, I ran out of nail polish remover, and so bethunk to get myself to the local late-night shop before I tucked into a big load of pizza, cider, and Dr Who DVDs.

Terrified

On my way back, I saw a nondescript gentleman heading into the car park of B&Q, pushing a terrified-looking Waitrose trolley (Waitrose being within 200 yards of B&Q) - that poor sad, shiny, green-barred fool was shivering, on its intact grey rubber wheels, with sheer TERROR at the prospect of spending the night - let alone its whole trolley LIFE - among the savage pack who service my local home improvers.

I did the unthinkable - alone, on the public highways at 10.45pm, I did say to this strange trolley hijacking freak, "that trolley comes from Waitrose!" (woo me!) and then offered, and proceeded to, walk it home - where it gratefully belonged, among the rest of the Waitrose green and shiny, well-behaved, NON-CARNIVOROUS, trolleys.

My local W serves organic, fair trade and farmer friendly tasty food to people who cannot leave the house without sporting at least ONE designer label - so you can imagine the poor little trolley's terror at being left to fend for itself among norf London's hardest chipped chrome gangstas.

Luckily the poor beastie met me before it was slammed into perdition, and I left it breathing a sigh of trolleyish relief in Waitrose's carpark, where the worst it will witness is a bit of dogging, and people recycling a large amount of Chardonnay bottles - every day.

I now consider this, a day well spent.

Plastic Bags Suck!

If you'd ever needed a reason, to abandon the plastic and reach for the real this is it.

Comment: Great God Of Gossip - LIVES!

Oh, my joy! Oh great God of Tediousness, You who birthed our modern media, isn't this great?
(I checked this out with Pat, or Padraig as he is today, and Nat_Chez, and they saw it too, so yea be it) – the village gossip is dead!

Long live, the village gossip!

Let me explain – back in "the olden days" we'd have, a small village, complete with inbreeding, rape and homophobia condemning the same among themselves yea most fiercely, while yet most of those actions were permitted to the masters who took the rent.

But it was, The Way Things Be.

Back then, in a small town, a LOCAL town, we'd have gossip, which "kept you in your place" – yes, securely owned by the community, but also securely OWNED by the community. Mercy to their whims.

At mercy of their stares, their speculation, their innermost "issues" projected/transferred, onto your sweet furry little arse.

RightWhingers

And now, oh how the right-whingers moan about lack of family values, lack of societal cohesion (ignoring it was that ultimate "righty" MaggieT who brought it about – but, I don't take sides, right and left both suck and the middle is grimmer still in the face of 2007's growing insane authoritarianism) – oh, but how they moan still, how much easier it is to look out upon this beautiful planet and make a horrible "them", and blame it for sacred "us."

So, we seem to some people, to have lost societal cohesion, family values – also known to those who have experienced tham as: grassing; bitching; bullying; ostracising; and, control via social pressures.

Fair enough.

Oh, but wait a moment – because upon yonder ridge I do see - - gossip magazines, that do pray and betray ("a source close to her, said" - not to mention the unmentionable mothers, exes, who sell out and speak up) -- and moan, and gripe, and WHINE - and: sit upon the pedestal of perfection no human is fit to sit upon until - -!

Behold! (gasps)

Yeah, and so behold, I do now see a larger village than before, and it's streets are paved in gossip, and despair. And yea, it is pleasing unto little piggy eyes which cannot behold something they do not have without crying tears of sheer pure acid hate.

I see strangers in Northumbria judging ye little Victoria Beckham from Leyton, and behold, if I was the God Of Smallmindedness, if I was The God OF Societal Control:
I do see people despairing and a wailing, and agnashing of teeth that models do not speak of the highest aspirations of soul, mind and intellect, and that vicars do shag:
if I alone was to be, your petty reason for mourning that tragic idea that humans are best left passing judgement upon each other, rather than getting peaceably on with their own lives – then yes, I’d rejoice in this stupid global village of paparazzi and candid cellulite shots.

God, can we never escape them!? Bummer!

(Next week - why it's okay to burn women if GOSSIP says they eat more/less/spend more on handbags than YOU. And just when you love yourself enough - here come the peasants with pitchforks!)